Posted
by
timothyon Thursday May 09, 2013 @10:55AM
from the please-be-careful-out-there dept.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "The promise of a fully 3D-printable gun is that it can spread via the Internet and entirely circumvent gun control laws. Two days after that digital weapon's blueprint first appeared online, it seems to be fulfilling that promise. Files for the printable gun known as that 'Liberator' have been downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days, according to Defense Distributed, the group that created it. Those downloads were facilitated by Kim Dotcom's startup Mega, which Defense Distributed is using to host the Liberator's CAD files. And it's also been uploaded to the Pirate Bay, where it's one of the most popular files in the filesharing site's uncensorable 3D printing category."

Sometimes when it means a weapon you can produce, on demand, with the materials at hand, the price is right no matter if it is much higher than otherwise.

Not to mention that eventually, this process could produce a weapons superior to the crap that it creates now. The more people looking at this process and being able to replicate it, the better it could become.

Agreed, that for people who know better, the current state of this art is overhyped crap. Too bad it is extremely illegal and even more unethical

I don't know of anything illegal or unethical about making a bunch of zip guns and turning them in for a gun buy-back. I'd go so far as to say it's a moral imperative. If you don't drain the gun buy-back fund with profitable junk, quality guns will be destroyed and utility will be lost.

Not to mention that eventually, this process could produce a weapons superior to the crap that it creates now.

Seriously? A plastic magazine I can understand (I have a couple). A plastic receiver? Maybe, just maybe. Even real "plastic pistols" have steel rails reinforcing them. A plastic barrel? No thank you. Without a decent source of steel barrels, I do not see ANYTHING good coming from this except for more "Darwin Award" candidates.

Not to mention that the "Liberators" (aka "the Darwinator") is a single-shot. Not a lot of room for improvement in single-shot guns. The tech is pretty much down to a science at this point (open action, replace bullet).

Now, if 3d printing has a way to use stronger plastics in the future, the MAYBE this will lead to some unique designs, but I would still want steel in the barrel and the bolt. And how exactly would you 3D print an extractor claw, small pins and springs, etc. that are strong enough to survive more than one shot?

Ammo is the problem. But I can imagine them being created and distributed among gangs. You think urban crime is bad now? You haven't seen nothing yet once the basement dwelling production starts.

Malarky.

Gang bangers can get a Saturday Night Special for less than $100 on the black market, one that's good for several shots. A 3d printed gun is good for maybe 1 shot, barring catastrophic failure, and use hundreds of dollars worth of material, not to mention the cost of the printer to make them with.

... and it will still be FUD by definition to assume the worst of said technological development.

Sure, in the future it may lead to cheaper weapons for criminals, but conversely, it will also lead to cheaper weapons for the oppressed. So, unless you're a supporter of fascist totalitarianism, there is an obvious upside.

Better faster and cheaper perhaps, but that does not mean that this particular method will ever be more cost effective then guns milled on existing hardware which will also continue to, as you say, get better/faster/cheaper. For that matter, it is not true that any individual technology will always get better faster or cheaper. History is littered with technologies that encountered diminishing returns on improvements and were abandoned or relegated to niches where there strengths outweigh their weaknesses

That's true of manufacturing too. Mass-produced guns will ALWAYS be cheaper and more reliable than one-off printed devices, because any significant improvement to 3D printing can also be applied to factories if it's good enough.

The domain of home-printed guns is solely that of the gun enthusiast, not the criminal who values practicality and speed above all else.

For now. 3D printers themselves were thousands of Dollars a few years ago.

Doesn't matter - people have been able to build a zip gun, at least equivalent in capability and reliability as the 3D printed gun (moreso in many cases), for less than $50 in parts since at least the 1960's.

US Army manual TM 31-210, which can be had for free with no more effort than a Google search, has instructions on several different versions.

For a criminal, the prospect to creating guns without serial numbers is potentially very appealing.

That's a really ignorant statement, because it assumes criminals buy from sources where serial numbers can be tracked.

In reality criminals don't care about serial numbers, because they are buying from illegal gun suppliers. Not having to abide by any rules, illegal guns are cheaper and easier to acquire and not traceable to boot.

So being able to print out a far less usable gun holds zero appeal to the criminal element.

A zip gun factory is a drill press, a vice and a chamber reamer. Lowes will cut the black pipe for you for free. Though Getting a 20 foot length cut into 40 6 inch pieces, each with one end threaded and 40 caps might get you the stink eye and a followup visit from the feds. Best to use someone else's car and pay cash.

Realistically, this method is not for people who could not otherwise obtain a weapon and is unlikely to ever be. What it does do is produce a physical manifestation of a largely intellectual and ideological point as part of a larger discussion. Such techniques are unlikely to have any impact on actual access to or ownership of weapons.

Those guys aren't concerned about this tech at all right now. You can get an AK-47 kit cheaper than a 3D printer in the US, and that hasn't hurt their business any. Now, many years from now when you can print a gun that looks just like one of the high-end guns from those companies, they'll be up in arms over trademark violations, but that's far off.

I not sure your typical/.er is aware of this, but annual gun sales have about doubled since Obama took office, and the joke of putting Obama's picture on a "salesman of the year" plaque has gone past common to cliche. The gun industry as a whole is quite happy with the current state of affairs.

There are a lot of progressives around here, and many of them are opposed to personal firearms ownership.

Certainly not all of us. I'm very much for gun ownership for one reason: As long as we cannot prevent criminals from having guns (most do, even in countries where gun possession is highly restricted), and cannot guarantee against the authorities abusing their armed power against the people (this has happened countless times already), people need to be armed in order to meet the challenge on an equal footing.

"and cannot guarantee against the authorities abusing their armed power against the people (this has happened countless times already)"

Here's a question that most people don't consider:

Given the thought of an "ARMED populous in the US' is in part to insure protection against Government tyranny or to out right overthrow a tyrannical Government" is scoffed at by most, why is it we send arms to "rebels" in other countries (who would otherwise be grocers or cobblers or other benign profession) to help them?

It doesn't take a lot of people unwilling to live by the common law to cause major problems.

Yes, it is accurate to state we have more recorded Violent Crime than you have in the USA. However I cannot help but notice, that you fail to qualify your statement by noting that the 2 countries use different methods to record/classify Violent Crimes. The following quote from the wikipedia article sums up the issue : "The comparison of violent crime statistics between countries is usually problematic, due to the way different countries classify crime. (1)"

I will leave it you to do the research into the differences in how our 2 countries record & classify violent crimes. I have provided links to both the FBI (2) and the ONS (3) report on Crime in England and Wales as starting points for your research...

Give a hundred old ladies guns, and another hundred old ladies pepper spray, and have rapists go after all of them (ethics review board might have an issue with the experimental design). I wouldn't be surprised in the pepper spray ladies did better.

Assuming the best case where the woman has warning and has time to draw the problem with a gun is it's lethal, I'm a guy but I have a lot of trouble thinking of a scenario where I'd actually shoot someone who hadn't already taken the first shot, ie at best my gun

Gun ownership among everyone in the U.K. is low. It was so low in WWII that ``The American Committee for defense of British Homes has organized to collect gifts of pistols, rifles, revolvers, shotguns (and binoculars) from American civilians who wish to answer the call and aid in defense of British homes'':

An interesting statistic is that a home is burglarized when occupied ~13% of the time in the U.S., while that number is 47% in the U.K. --- my father worked as a prison guard, and a recurring theme among people serving time for robbery was the importance of ``casing the joint'' because one didn't want to risk confronting an armed home-owner.

No kidding. Any idiot can walk into Home Depot and buy everything you need to make a zip gun in about 20 minutes. It's not like you need to weld and hand forge the damned thing. It's just a pipe and something to strike the primer with.

Except that it never really took skill. As a young lad I made several (incredibly dangerous) guns out of scrap metal. All I had was a hacksaw, a drill, and some files. I could probably whip one out in under 30 minutes if properly motivated, and it would survive more than a couple rounds.

The way this is promoted in the news you'd think that zip guns never existed, and until "just hours ago" there was no way to come up with an improvised weapon.

The difference is, things like "zip guns" are actual guns that fire. This story is about plans that could potentially be used to make a gun. Are there 100k 3D printers that could use these plans in existence?

I'm guessing most of these downloads will live the life of most warez and media downloaded. It will sit forgotten in someone's download folder, gathering dust, until it is eventually deleted or lost unused.

100k downloads translate into how many guns printed? I'd put the over/under at 20.

It sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it would be much harder for them to injure each other without weapons.

I do not believe in the "guns do not promote injury, therefore they can be safely allowed" argumentation. Gun-ownership should (as should ownership of anything) be a question of freedom, not a question of damage minimization. (Because the regulators will always win the latter. More regulation will always give less injuries. And if it doesn't, it was because the regulations weren't oppressive and i

There are quite a few leisure activities that are potentially dangerous, even lethal. Outlaw them all? Freeclimbing, paragliding, basejumping... they all serve no real purpose and are very dangerous, potentially lethal and accidents can turn ugly very fast.

Or is that ok 'cause so few people do it that it doesn't matter even when 30% of them died every year?

Good analogy. So, let's put the same restrictions on guns like we do on automobiles here in the U.S. You know, registration is required, licenses are required, insurance is required. In some states, an inspection is required. How does all that work for you?

A better analogy is with the other rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Do you want to have to register before you can speak freely? Do you want to require a licensing before one is allowed to plead the 5th? Do you want to have your home inspected before you're allowed to assert your 4th amendment rights?

Who pretty much has that anyway? We don't register, license, or inspect guns in most places in America [wikipedia.org], certainly not anywhere I've lived (Alaska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Nevada, Wisconsin). When I got my first gun I asked, "so how do I register it?" and people laughed at me. "Register it? Why would you do that?"

The answer to "come up with some meaningful way to get people to lock up firearms" is insurance. If people had to buy insurance against mis-use of their firearms then that would be a 90% solution to the problem. Insurers would do inspections of homes and come up with rubrics by which to judge risk that a person would allow their gun to be used improperly. People who securely lock their guns would pay low rates, wackaloon rednecks with small cocks who wave guns around like it was the end times would pay high rates, perhaps high enough to be prohibitive.

Like having laws against child abuse, we don't let people "get their progeny killed". We here in Western Civilization consider that bad because it is a violation of individual rights -- you don't get to do just any fuck-all thing you want to your children, because your children are people not property. Only an asshat would suggest that as a good reason to let fucktards be negligent with guns.

I'm all in favor of focusing on preventing automobile deaths. In fact, if we scrapped the entire "war on terror" and used those hundreds of billions to build out public transport infrastructure befitting a first-world nation, we'd be doing far better in the "saving lives" department. However, a significant difference between cars and guns: cars provide a heck of a lot more than 50% more useful functionality to society than guns, so they're perhaps "worth" slightly more carnage. Which would cause more proble

If firearms stop working, every human being is at the mercy of larger and stronger people.

Fortunately, 100% of larger and stronger people aren't vicious muder-rapist psychopaths just waiting for the chance to rampage over society. I think there are plenty of perfectly nice large and strong people to handle the tiny few who suddenly decide to go rogue. Hey, I already walk around unarmed --- a short, flabby weakling --- and yet don't regularly get beset by burly bandits. With guns, I'm still at the mercy of those better armed, with better marksmanship, and more willingness to initiate violence with the element of surprise (no matter how well-armed a sharpshooter I am, I'm still screwed if a stranger decides to shoot me in the back of my head).

And when your assailant has a gun, you're 0.1 seconds away from being dead (assuming they aren't polite enough to stop and chat first, instead of just shooting you before you realize what's happening). And, just as guns "empower" physically weak good guys, they also empower every scrawny punk-ass meth-head --- so now, instead of worrying about the one big burly evil dude, my chances of being murdered are multiplied to every cowardly little shit with a pistol (or being caught in the crossfire when a "good guy" goes paranoid vigilante).

I live unarmed, surrounded by unarmed people, several minutes away from armed response. I also live freely without cowering in paranoid fear. Billions of others on this planet do the same. Stopping crime is far better done by assuring equality and opportunity and decent conditions to all, than by gun-totin' vigilantes patrolling their little violent fiefdoms. When no one's life is so miserable that shooting up a liquor store for $42 looks like an upward career move, there's far less crime. I wish to live in a world where people respect one another out of shared humanity, not fear they'll end up on the wrong end of a gun --- and I'm living my wish.

Stopping crime is far better done by assuring equality and opportunity and decent conditions to all, than by gun-totin' vigilantes patrolling their little violent fiefdoms.

I don't disagree. Where we part company is when you suggest that reducing private gun ownership won't lead to more gun-totin' vigilantes patrolling their little violent fiefdoms. Only we won't call them vigilantes, we'll just call them cops who happen to shoot a lot of people dead "in the line of duty".

Because automobiles provide a useful purpose- bringing people to and from jobs, entertainment, etc. It has a positive effect on people's lives, and we decide its worth the cost. Guns provide no use aside from hunting, which a tiny minority of guns are actually used for.

Also, on a per capita basis its ridiculously the other way. The majority of people don't own guns, but do own cars. So a far larger percentage of gun owners cause deaths than car owners.

Gun deaths in the US in 2010: 11,078 homicides, 19,392 suicides, and 606 unintentional killings.

Why is no one screaming to Congress to ban automobiles?

Because that's a stupid argument, and you already know the answer.

In the vietnam war, 58,000 american soldiers lost their lives. A large number (but not all) US citizens campaigned for US troups to pull out, and eventually that happened. You see the thing about a democracy is, that you make decisions based on the majority, not the minority. It so happens that an overwhelming majority or americans believe that cars are a good thing, and should not be banned. The problem with gun ownership, is that there is now a majority of americans who believe that restrictions on gun ownership should be tightened (to some degree). They might not agree on everything, but there is general agreement for tighter restrictions. You might not like this, you might not agree with it, but unfortunately, you live in a democracy and therefore have to accept societies wishes I'm afraid. The best thing you can do, is stop making trite arguments, and start making sensible suggestions for compromises that would both be acceptable for you, and for the anti-gun lobby.

Since you brought up Automobile deaths vs Firearms death, lets really look at the data.

Number of households in the US: 114,761,359 (2007-2011)
Number of households in the US with at least one automobile: (90.9% 2010): 104,318,076
Number of households in the US with at least one firearm: (47% Gallup 2011): 53,937,839

Number of deaths involving an automobile in the US: (2010) 35,332 (no breakdown of accidental, homicide, or suicide given)
Number of deaths involving a firearm in the US: (2010) 31,672 including 11,078 homicides, 606 accidental discharge, 19,392 suicides, 252 undeterminable intent, 344 other.

Using the above (all from US census with the exception of the gallop poll as indicated which agrees with NRA estimates), lets normalize the mortality rate based on availability within a household:
Number of deaths per 100,000 households with automobiles involving an automobile in US: 33.9
Number of deaths per 100,000 households with firearms involving a firearm in US: 58.7

As you can see the mortality rate from firearms is 24.8 greater than automobiles. The correct method of interpreting these calculations are as follows:
34 out of 100,000 households with an automobile experienced or caused a death with an automobile in 2010.
59 out of 100,000 households with a firearm experienced or caused a death with a firearm in 2010.
(Note: "experienced or caused a death" signifies that the death originated from the item within the household. The death itself can be within a household that doesn't possess the item.)

This exercise highlights the fact that while there were 3,660 more deaths involving automobiles than firearms in 2010, only 47% of the households had access to a firearm versus 90.9% of the households having access to a motor vehicle.

Despite your assertion that "No one is screaming to Congress to ban automobiles", there are quite a large number of governmental regulations related to motor vehicles. Comparing automobile deaths with firearm related deaths actually hurts your argument since it demonstrates that the regulation of manufacture (safety, fuel efficiency, pollution controls), ownership (registration and taxation) and operation (licensing and traffic enforcement) keeps the mortality rate of automobile ownership quite low despite being in almost 91% of households.

Of course this ignores the fact automobiles are designed to transport people and firearms are designed to kill.

Indeed, not much, and woefully inadequate. I suppose this varies by state -- when I first got a driver's license, you had to submit a certificate from a certified drivers' ed provider that you had completed ~16 hours of training. That's still ~16 hours more than required to grab a gun, which you're also allowed to carry around and/or operate after/while knocking back a few beers.

You do have a Constitutional right to own and carry a firearm

Just because it's in the Constitution (possibly with scope limitations to indicate use within "a well regulated militia") doesn't

Aside from the fact that you assume anyone that is a proponent of the 2nd Amendment is too incompetent to evaluate and safely utilize this technology, you also demonstrate that this whole argument really has nothing to do with saving lives. You're perfectly willing to sacrafice innocent lives so long as their loss serves your political agenda.

You completely overlooked the voluntary vs. involuntary / negligent aspect of that loss of life. I'm all for assisted suicide and less state nannying when people decide to put only themselves in dangerous situations.

Really? Places with no guns have zero people? Aside from pedantic arguments that alternate prior histories would produce alternate people (so "you" in specific would not be here, but a lot of different people would), I'd say the entire history of human civilization before guns (and continued existence of humans in regions of less or no guns) flatly contradicts the idea that guns are a basic necessity of life.

Suicidal people will find other methods of harming themselves, attacking the instrument used to attempt suicide is sort of missing the point, no?

Not true at all. If suicide is easy and convenient, the suicide rate will be much higher. Nothing is easier than pointing a handgun at your head and giving the trigger a little tug. Using a long gun (rifle or shotgun) is only slightly harder, but they are used in suicides far less. Homes with handguns have higher suicide rates than homes with long guns, which have higher suicide rates than homes with no guns. So claiming that suicidal people will "find a way" is not true.

I own a couple long guns (a rifle and a shotgun) and I am a strong supporter of gun rights. I accept a higher suicide rate as a price we pay for living in a free society. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing that there is no trade off, and freedom has no cost.

I've just done a quick tour on Japanese suicide statistics and it's a pretty mixed bag. Mostly people commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of trains, hanging, jumping off cliffs or overdosing - just as in most other countries, people are looking for a painless end to their sorrows, not a painful and protracted death bed to make a political statement.

Since the railway charges the family with the cost of the delays etc., more people are turning to gassing themselves - with all the risk for the area

100,000 sounds like a lot of downloads, but I would bet that less than 10% will actually go through the process of printing one. Of those printed, many hobbyists will just do it to see if it's possible. How many people are going to be willing to fire one?

Not even printing and assemblng the weapon breaks gun control law. You need no license or certification to produce a firearm, unless that weapon is a class3 (fully auto, cannons, sawed off shotguns, mortars, etc.), or you intend to sell it.

Not even printing and assemblng the weapon breaks gun control law. You need no license or certification to produce a firearm, unless that weapon is a class3 (fully auto, cannons, sawed off shotguns, mortars, etc.), or you intend to sell it.

Almost. There is federal law banning the production of "undetectable" guns, so you have to be sure you add a significant chunk of metal to make it legal. Assuming you do that, then, yes, it's legal.

. . . current law already allows home hobbyists to build their own firearms provided they are for personal use only (and not for sale). Such guns are already “untraceable.” 3D-printing doesn’t change that basic fact — it merely allows a wider range of hobbyists without specialized machine shop skills to do what’s already legal. . . more [forbes.com]

In countries where that are significant gun control laws, I doubt that this is going to change much. Such countries also have other laws that control other things. In the US this would be a very expensive way to circumvent laws that do not exist. Any FFL compliance is voluntary. Anyone can sell gun to anyone on the street. The only prosecutions that occur is when there is knowledge that the sale would otherwise be regulated. I have seen sales go off on school prop

I realize lots of hunters, etc reload their own, but I'm not aware of too many DIY'ers who are able to make reliable primers (might be wrong) - so maybe just control the sale and distribution of primers?

That sounds like the Drake Equation [wikipedia.org] used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations. You have the first three steps...

1. How many people will download it? (solved)2. How many people will print it?3. How many will assemble it?4. How many will fire it?5. How many will actually use it to further a crime?6. How many will cause injury with it in the commission of a violent crime?7. How many will kill somebody with it?

DISCLAIMER: I am a godless liberal in some respects, so I might be biased...but this is becoming like bitcoin, guys. A 3D printed gun is cool to me as a demonstration of the advanced state of the technology, but we don't need a story of even little happening with TEH 3D PRONTED GUNNS (GUBERMIENT, etc).

Slashdot has become awash with political crap. Let's return to a site for nerds, stuff that matters. Not stuff that rallies the libertarians and the collectivists, okay?

Slashdot has become awash with political crap. Let's return to a site for nerds, stuff that matters. Not stuff that rallies the libertarians and the collectivists, okay?

I would mod you up even more for your insightful words, but you are already at +5.

Slashdot, *please* go back to News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters!And while im in rant mode, *please* realise that not all of us are Americans, Stuff that Matters shouldnt be about some democrat vs republican bullshit.

The promise of a fully 3D-printable gun is that it... entirely circumvent[s] gun control laws.

I'm sorry, that is just false. In my state, Massachusetts, for example, you need a license to *possess* any firearm.

All 3D-printable weapons really circumvent is the Federal background check, which you can just as easily bypass by buying at a gun show. Well, that and whatever state laws may require a license to buy a gun but not to own or carry it. (Those may or may not exist; if they do then they seem pretty stupid.)

It would be smart to at least check what the laws in your state actually are, before you print one of these puppies out.

The whole point was to prove that antigun laws are as useless and counterproductive as the war on drugs.

Next up: downloadable and printable schematics for a uranium enrichment facility, because you know, what good are nuclear laws as established by the IAEA, when anybody and their grandmother can make a nuclear bomb in their kitchen?

The whole point was to prove that antigun laws are as useless and counterproductive as the war on drugs.

Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.

Thorough gun control is analogous to bomb control. Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb. Like all other hazardous items (with the curious exception of guns), individuals have to be licensed to handle bombs and there is probably a federal registry that lists all of them and where they store their bomb-building supplies.

People in the United States don't have lots of bombs in their houses. Why, then, would gun control enforcement pose any particular challenge?

Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.

Define "works". If your definition includes "reduces intentional homicides", you're provably wrong. Plot a graph of private gun ownership rates against intentional homicide rates around the world and what you'll find is that there is no correlation. In fact based on the most recent numbers from UNODC and the 2007 small arms report, there's a slight negative correlation, which means that countries with more guns tend to have fewer homicides.

I'd also point out that the very first "metal" guns weren't all that safe and reliable as well. So this is a generation 1 prototype. Consider in 20 years, when 3D printers are in most middle class homes (if we still have a middle class). What do you think 20 years of tweaking and discovery will do? Might these become more reliable, & safer,... there was a time that folk though using a polymer frame on a handgun was ludicrus. Glocks and many others have shown that is NOT the case.

A) Many of the same people who want to do away with private ownership of guns also oppose the death penalty under any circumstances.

B) Criminals in regions that still employ the death penalty kidnap, rape and kill despite the consequences of being caught. Crazy, right? Criminals ignore laws and punishment!! We *really* ought to try and reach them. Maybe a PSA?